Posted
by
timothyon Sunday June 10, 2012 @11:27PM
from the for-great-justice dept.

ChromeAeonium writes "Shortly after the events in Rothamsted Research in the UK, where a publicly funded trial of wheat genetically engineered to repel aphids was threatened by activists with destruction and required police protection, another publicly funded experiment involving genetically engineered crops faces possible destruction (original in Italian). The trial, which is being conducted by researchers at the University of Tuscia in Italy on cherries, olives, and kiwis genetically engineered to have traits such as fungal disease resistance, started three decades ago. When field research of GE plants was banned in Italy in 2002, the trial received an extension to avoid being declared illegal, but was denied another in 2008, and following a complaint from the Genetic Rights Foundation, now faces destruction on June 12th, despite appeals from scientists. The researchers claim that the destruction is scientifically unjustifiable (only the male kiwis produce transgenic pollen and their flowers are removed) and wish to gather more information from the long running experiment."

If you are genitically modifying crops they MUST be kept isoated from nature and ensure that they cannot contaminate conventional or organic farms with patented gene. Sealed greenhouse whatever. IF you can accomplish that then carry on and label your product as such.

If you are genitically modifying crops they MUST be kept isoated from nature.

People have been genetically modifying crops for ten thousand years. Banning genetic research makes about as much sense as banning motorcycle repair, because the motorcycles might escape and survive in the wild.

Selective breeding and GMO are too entirely different things. Allowing GMO makes about as much sense as letting self-driving, self-replicating motorcycle drones on the road because "we're pretty sure" they won't go Terminator on us.

Look up 'rafflesia', it's a plant that exchanges DNA with the organism it's a parasite on.

You don't even have to get that exotic. Plants can exchange genes via graft unions. [sciencemag.org] Most all fruit you eat is propagated by grafting, so it may be that every grafted plant has some gene transfer going on. Or to get even closer, here's a good example. [nih.gov] Turns out the Syncytin genes critical for human reproduction probably came from a virus. Everyone who says transgenes don't occur in nature had their syncytiotrophoblast made by one.

There's even the theory that human evolution is caused, not by mutations, but by DNA swapping by viruses (mostly) and bacteria. Individual genes in humans don't evolve. They go from (very complex) state A -> (even more complex) state B without passing anywhere in between. Why ? Unknown, but if you discount Harun Yahya, the idea seems to be that someone's gonads get infected with DNA rewriting viruses.

And it is quite understandable that it works this way. Humans reproduce once every 20 years (12 years at the earliest, so let's call it 16 years worldwide average, because that's 2^4, which just happens to be an easy number to calculate with). The search space for the protein is ~ 4^2000 (2000 basepairs, discounting the gene's metadata*, and there's loads of them that are much larger). So how long would it take a human race to make a single modification to a single protein ? 4^2000 / avg. number of humans (= 4 ^ 16 say) * 20 (let's say) 4 ^ 2 years = 4 ^ 1986 = 2 ^ 3972 years. Which is *far* longer than the universe has existed.

Needless to say, this points rather strongly to the idea that we, as humans, and even life on earth as a whole, did not evolve due to mutation primarily, but due to GMO viruses, which essentially "share" the discoveries of lower, very short lived protozoa with higher lifeforms like ourselves.

* in reality DNA (in eukaryots, like humans) looks a hell of a lot like a filesystem. Genes have symbolic names (which are just a sequence of basepairs, which then get indexed. Genes can refer to one another using this symbolic name). They have length data, they even have what might be termed permissions ("only translate this gene if protein X is present in at least concentration Y" is one of them). They have small non-translateable programs that get executed by the cell nucleus to do something (in most cases we don't know what exactly) before actually using the gene. They have small programs associated with them that rewrite the gene when executed upon normal cell division. They have small sections that get executed during meiosis (which is the cell division used for procreation, sometimes jokingly referred to as sex division, since that's what it's used for) (an example is code that essentially does this : "mommies_hla_code = hla_code; while(hla_code == mommies_hla_code) hla_code = random(297)", which resets one of the access codes for the immune system, but makes sure that, for the first few months after birth, mommie's access codes will work correctly, and her cells can operate inside the feutus/baby without getting massacred by the child's immune system).

The DNA double helix we all know is a "serialized" form of DNA that isn't effectively present in the cell during normal operation (only during division). Instead the double helix is unrolled and present as a networked structure, which uses molecular "ropes", for example, link the symbolic names of a gene to the actual gene (think of it this way, if you have "int c = 5;" somewhere in the DNA code, during normal cell operation everywhere you find an actual use of "c", e.g. "translate(c)" you would find a physical thread that you can follow to arrive at the "int c = 5;" declaration). There are also a lot of proteins, which we mostly do not know, that execute all those bits of metadata coupled with genes.

The weird part is that we haven't yet found the DNA that encodes the function of the cell nucleus. I mean, given that we've found it in pretty much every other organelle, we're pretty fucking sure we will find it eventually... but if you want a nobel prize, finding this would probably get you one, especially if it's somehow weird, which is entirely possible.

And how is that different from every other random mutation and genetic alteration? Genetic engineering is different from selective breeding, sure (so is every other breeding technique like back crossing and wide crossing, and other similar techniques like hybridization, and other plant improvement methods like induced polyploidy, mutagenesis, sport selection, embryo rescue, ect.) and the genes come from farther, but why exactly is that a bad thing (provided you understand the genes being used)? Okay, the

Evolutionary changes are slow, incremental and affect one individual at a time who must then pass them on to their offspring for them to take hold in the general population. Selective breeding is still slow and incremental. Genetic engineering slaps large amounts of new material from completely foreign species into a large number of individuals at once.

Note that most environmentalists are not saying that we should stop genetic modification of crops entirely, merely that the pace we are doing it and the fact

Allowing GMO makes about as much sense as letting self-driving, self-replicating motorcycle drones on the road because "we're pretty sure" they won't go Terminator on us.

You're saying if we invent self-driving, self replicating motorcycles, you'd want us to assume that they were going to rise up and destroy us? I actually would be a lot more okay with that than a lot of GMO. I mean, organisms have been subject to millions of years of evolution to adapt, reproduce, and consume natural resources. I'm pretty confident that Suzuki wouldn't be able to make something that competitive anytime soon.

You could say they were different, in that selective breeding is blindly causing mutations and trying to select mostly the beneficial ones, whereas in GMO, we have a pretty good idea of what is being added, if not where. That makes selective breeding worse. As for your car analogy, nature is already full of self-replicators out to kill us, so unless you call for the destruction of all non-farming life, it really isn't applicable to this debate.

One reason why isolation is neccessary is because GMO plants tend to contain patented genes. If the pollen spreads then random farmers can now be sued by large corporatons even though they did nothing wrong. The only reasonable options I can think of are:

- GMO plants must be cultivated in sealed greenhouses or the farmer needs to take other effective measures to prohibit the spread of pollen to unlicensed farms. Can be combined with the second option.
- If pollen spreads it's clearly the fault of the farmer who grew the plants and thus THAT farmer is liable for patent violation, not the receiving farmer. The courts should find as such. Unfortunately, most farmers are going to settle without going to court so this is not a satisfactory solution. Also, the corporations are going to fight this tooth and nail as it doesn't allow them to pressure people into buying licenses.
- GMO licenses are required to cover the farm and any area likely to be pollinated around it. The lobby won't allow it.
- GMO plants are required to be sterile and pollen-free. This would probably lead to those plants being clones, which is not a good solution.
- Gene patents are declared invalid or unenforcable. Unlikely.
- GMO plants are banned entirely. Baby-and-bathwater scenario.

Do we have any better feasible option than to require the use of greenhouses to reduce unlicensed pollination? I don't think that "you can be sued by a big corporation because of something perfectly legal your neighbor did" is a state we should put farmers in.

you can be sued by a big corporation because of something perfectly legal your neighbor did

I agree with that. However, if you look at any high profile case where a farmer was sued, the Schmeiser case, the Parr case, the Roush case, the Rinehart case, the Ralph case, ect., you find that when charges were pressed there was more than simple cross pollination occurring. I've often asked people who make that claim to direct me to a case where it actually happened but every time deeper investigation reveals it did not (though if that's not the case I'd rather have my foot in my mouth than go uncorrected). The lawsuits come from one of two sources: either someone signed a contract agreeing not to save seed, then did anyway, or someone was cross pollinated and was found to have intentionally selected for the trait. Don't do either of those and you don't get sued. So, the patent violation angle really doesn't pan out very well as an argument for keeping GE crops in a glass bubble. If you are talking about what courts should find, here's what they did find: a recent lawsuit filed against Monsanto, suing them to prevent Monsanto from suing farmers for cross pollination, was dismissed on the grounds that it does not happen. [reuters.com] If it did happen it would be a concern, no one disagrees with that, however, whether or not it actually happens is important.

I doubt you'll see sterile crops after the uproar over the terminator gene, despite it being able to prevent cross pollination issues. Damned if you do and damned if you don't.

That line of reasoning is self-contradictory - thousands of years for problems to shake out. Gene splicing gives us, at best, only years of testing on tiny populations - and often less than that under the flawed theory that genes which are benign in one organism will remain benign when spliced into a new organism.

Even with tens of thousands of years of experience, sometimes we still eat dangerous food, for example - fiddlehead fern is commonly eaten in Korea, even considered medicinal when eaten, but it is

It isn't like we did selective breeding thousands of years ago and then stopped and have been testing the results ever since. It is a continual process, where each new cultivar has exactly the same potential for problems as any other, older cultivars had when they where new, and a slightly higher potential than new GMO cultivars (in GMO, we know what is added, if not where, in selective breeding, we know neither).

It isn't like we did selective breeding thousands of years ago and then stopped and have been testing the results ever since. It is a continual process, where each new cultivar has exactly the same potential for problems as any other,

Rolling it out is also a continuous process. Compare that to round-up ready corn which went from the lab to practically 100% of the crop in like a decade.

(in GMO, we know what is added, if not where, in selective breeding, we know neither).

In GMO we don't necessarily have a clue about the systemic effects of the changes. So we take a couple of genes that have a primary effect of increasing pesticide resistence, but what we don't notice is that in the original organism harmful secondary effects were repressed by the existence of other genes, genes we didn't splice into the new organism. At

Rolling it out is also a continuous process. Compare that to round-up ready corn which went from the lab to practically 100% of the crop in like a decade.

It would make sense to limit the speed of introduction (when that is possible. This is often not practically possible for e.g. disease resistance), but this applies to all cultivars, regardless of their origin.

In GMO we don't necessarily have a clue about the systemic effects of the changes. So we take a couple of genes that have a primary effect of increasing pesticide resistence, but what we don't notice is that in the original organism harmful secondary effects were repressed by the existence of other genes, genes we didn't splice into the new organism. At best GMO is neutral for predicting unintended side-effects.

That applies in equal measure to selective breeding, except that there are many more potentially harmful pathways which may be affected by it. At worst GMO is neutral for predicting unintended side-effects.

That applies in equal measure to selective breeding, except that there are many more potentially harmful pathways which may be affected by it.

I see no way to support that claim. When GMO programs do things like insert genes from fish into tomatoes or bacteria into corn or even daffodils into rice there is simply no equivalent in the world of selective breeding.

Your hyperbole aside, it makes no sense at all for you to claim that people have been genetically modifying anything for ten thousand years. That's hybridization, which is not remotely the same as GMO.

GMO can be fine. Just keep the shit separate and labeled until the science has progressed to the point where it can be said with real confidence that current ecosystems will be protected for generations. Don't tell me that you know what will happen in the wild, because even the best scientists cannot state with any reasonable certainty that they know either. They hope. Gutcheck says yes. No hard data to back that up, and that will take time. Not 5 years, not 10 years, but more than likely 50,100, or more years.

Everything does not have to be so fast. Take your time. Not such a bad idea either, because contrary to popular belief, the Earth is not that big of a place. We have ONE Earth right now. That's it. Fuck it up and we are a toast. We are doing a good enough job of that already with the ecosystems that we have. Hmmmm.... Let's add some GMO to it as well.

There is now evidence that such engineering has caused collapse of bee colonies.

Do you have a quote for that? Last I heard, neonecotinoids were the most likely cause of CCD, and I can't find any references to plant being genetically modified to make neonecotinoids.

Imagine that next year, thanks to your allergy to some weed and the wonders of genetic engineering, you are now also allergic to wheat, corn, soybeans and carrots that contain the popular new plant-pesticide.

Assuming we do not transfer genes which produce known allergens (I assume we are not, please inform me if I am mistaken), this isn't more of a problem than it already is other crop modification techniques.

Allergies are reactions to specific molecules produced by a plant. They are not reactions to plant species. Nightshades are not known allergens. They produce known allergens. Genes are screened against an allergen database in an extremely conservative fashion before being considered for cloning into another species. There are additional tests, but nothing that is a known allergen, or is similar to a known allergen will ever get past the planning stages.

Medelson? What's he got to do with GMO plants? (Scott Medelson, shown on you-Tube as bench pressing 1080 lbs., is the first hit most of the time once you get Google to actually show you Medelsons instead of Mendelssohns). Sirrah, I suspect you mean the Physics teacher and friar, Gregor Mendel.

While he has some points about damage already being done, and preventative measures being put into place to prevent cross contamination, it is disingenuous at worst, and at best ignorance to claim the GMO is the same thing Mendelson was doing playing with peas.

What Mendelson did, and what others have done for thousands of years is hybridization. Not just plants, but animals too.

To understand the difference, think of like Tetris. Hybridization is arranging the blocks to form patterns. Some patterns can be advantageous and desirable, while others are not. GMO, is altering the blocks themselves to form the patterns.

At least with hybridization you are taking two species and breeding them together. This could have happened naturally, and is much less prone to danger. There is still danger. Non indigenous species have already damaged and changed ecosystems countless times since Man started carrying so much crap with him from one place to another.

GMO, involves methods much more dangerous. Death codes anyone? It is beyond hubris to think that we know enough to mess with the fundamental codes of life itself, and downright insane to proceed like you know with certainty the complete consequences of your actions over any meaningful period of time.

Now I am not arguing that the very field itself should be banned and not pursued. Just use some fucking prudence and make absolutely sure to protect the current ecosystems that we have right now.

Biological warfare is conducted in protected laboratories for this reason, and GMO is biological warfare in that you cannot possibly state with credulity and assurance that the consequences of your actions will not bring great harm to our current ecosystems.

Just have some god damned patience. Science is not done over night, and the field of genetics does not have to progress so dangerously fast out in the open.

Most of our food production problems ARE POLITICAL, and not about resources. There is enough food thrown away every day in the US to feed Africa (or at least really damn close), and Ethiopia, the poster child of starvation is starving mostly due to political and economic reasons (agricultural policies).

It's funny that people against GMO get accused of having their heads in the sand, being anti-science, etc. when most people who are for GMO, purportedly based on science and reason, want to completely ignore even the mere possibility that things can go wrong.

To understand the difference, think of like Tetris. Hybridization is arranging the blocks to form patterns. Some patterns can be advantageous and desirable, while others are not. GMO, is altering the blocks themselves to form the patterns.

You will often start by bathing the seed in mutagens or hard radiation to effect changes in the blocks. How is this different from GMO, except for the blindfolding?

At least with hybridization you are taking two species and breeding them together. This could have happened naturally, and is much less prone to danger.

Ah, the naturalistic fallacy.

Biological warfare is conducted in protected laboratories for this reason, and GMO is biological warfare in that you cannot possibly state with credulity and assurance that the consequences of your actions will not bring great harm to our current ecosystems.

As opposed to selective breeding, where you can? Or is selective breeding also biological warfare?

It's Mendel. I added the 'n', but forgot to take of the rest while editing.

I'm not a Luddite either. I said let's do the science, but take better precautions since we only have one Earth. If this was 500 fucking years from now and the Weyland corporation wanted to do a fuck ton of risky genetic research on an Earth-like planet go for it.

If am a Luddite afraid of the future, then you and the pro-GMO people are Nazi scientists willing to cause great immediate harm just to further your own

According to the resources I can find online, they believed that the machines had caused unemployment and lowered the textile workers' standard of living. A traditional/. analogy including buggy whip makers comes to mind.

In the Italian case, these are perennial asexually propagated crops, so even if cross pollination did occur, it would have zero effect on a farm. Second, I grow in my garden open pollinated plants. I save the seed because they are some oddball varieties that cannot be bought in stores. If they are cross pollinated, I lose the pure variety, and I'm out of luck. If you do the same on a farm, the same holds true, and this is for any gene. Singling out transgenes does not make sense. Sure, I get that there is a market for it, but that shouldn't put undue burdens on other growers. I mean, what if suddenly there is a market for rice without the sd-1 gene, should every rice grower out there bend over backwards to prevent cross pollination?

with patented gene

Perhaps you missed the first two words in the title. What you are saying would be like bashing Linux because you hate Microsoft because you saw a documentary about how Microsoft goes around kicking puppies.

And i'd add just one thing on why that shit NEEDS to be locked up, at least here in the states...Kudzu. Do you have ANY idea how far that shit has spread across the south? That damned Kudzu is like a cancer of the land, swallowing everything in its path. I've seen huge buildings just swallowed up whole by the Kudzu and once that shit digs in its hell to get out without pesticides and burning, because it quickly becomes home to poisonous snakes and is damned dangerous to be near.

Recently Kudzu has been looked at by farmers, yes farmers as an alternative to standard hay feed for cows and goats. Turns out that cows and goats will eat kudzu with good affect. Farmers did not have farming tools up to the task of dealing with the tough root/vine system that makes Kudzu so resilient, that is changing.

Commercialzing this way [maxshores.com] or this way [ncsu.edu] may be the way to go. Once mankind figures out a way to make a buck on something, rest assured that something will be used up. At this point farming ne

Or just don't patent it. As our population continues to surge we *need* to be able to produce food in greater quantities, and of consistent quality.

Or cut down on population. Which is doable without resorting to war or murder (but, I repeat myself). Put the money into sex ed uncontaminated by religion, free prophylactics, and rewards for not having children. Positive reinforcements, not negative like China did.

It will happen with improved education and rights for women. Birth rate in Europe (1.59 births per female) / US (2.0 births per female) / Japan (1.37 births per female) is far below replacement rate (which is 2.1), evidence from South America is that women given the choice and access to edcuation and contraception have fewer children and birth rates are falling there (Brazil at 1.86 from 2.81 in 1990). The same will be true for the rest of the world (eg India 2.63 from 3.92 in 1990).

Population is not a concern. The only reason why we have hunger is due to corrupt governments not because we can't produce enough food. We throw warehouses of bread out daily in the west. Western "food pantries" and the like are picker with what they will accept and won't accept than I am at the grocery store. Seriously, I volunteered at one and things that I'd have no problem buying at the grocery store they told me to throw away! Things such as pop tarts that had a hole in the box (not the individually wrapped pastries mind you), a gatorade bottle where the label had fallen off (despite the fact the top of the sealed container clearly said gatorade), etc.

The population will naturally decrease over time in the developing world like it has in the developed world, no need to be concerned. The world is a big place.

Sorry, but that's proof that the plural of anecdote is not data. I'm a regular volunteer at my church's outreach food distributions, and when we get more food than is needed we pass the rest on selectively to several different area food pantries, and usually stick around after delivery, help out, and sometimes even call their needs list for them and such to help them deal with a sudden spike in resources like that. What they will accept is very variable (Which is as it should be - private charities don't all need to be in lockstep.), and while I know places that would wory about a label coming off, I know more that wouldn't. For the hole in the outer package, it may make a difference if it was clearly a puncture or tear or if it looked like it might, even just possibly, be gnawed, but again, some places would take the foil packets out and pass them on, and some would give it out as is.
I'm not disagreeing with what you wrote about the effects of corrupt governments either, but I suspect you are extrapolating too far, and maybe treating it like the whole story. Right now, giving to some nations mans propping up the parasites they have for "leaders", and.knowing a lot of materials won't get through. But, people have the choice to give to organizations that largely work around those governments, and there are ways, so long as your standard is not 100% honest government selflessly concerned about every starving person in that nation, and blind to any ethnic differences, or you're not going to give at all. There are still places where people are just plain going hungry.

This is not meant as a swipe at British of the day or British today, there were of course many decent people who did look after the poor or their tenants, but sadly they were in the minority in Ireland at the time.

The only reason why we have hunger is due to corrupt governments not because we can't produce enough food

You're right that overpopulation isn't currently causing hunger. But the population growth is still increasing, not decreasing, meaning that may not hold true forever. Furthermore, there are many other factors that could compound with high population to cause food shortages: monoculture of many basic foods (leading to disease susceptibility), porous borders for agricultural pathogens and pests, colony collapse disorder, and climate change. And those are just the ones I could think up quickly.

Planning is good, but there's two process here to accounted for: As the absolute well being of a population increases, in the first stage the population will grow explosively because while there's a sudden drop in child mortality, the reproduction habits do not change in the same time. But, as in the forth cycle of demographic stage kicks in, sexual habits are changing in the adult population due to the increasing

Likewise, using genetech to produce insuline should be stopped immediately. The only way to cut down on diabetes is to improve your diet. Hell, I throw healthy veggies away daily because everybody wants to eat hamburgers and drink coke all the time. Diabetes prone people will die off naturally over time and than we have solved the problem.

Same argument can be made about most avenues of progress. You sir, are anti-progressive. Look into a mirror, you do not deserve a/. id (so says the AC).

People generally reproduce before they die of type-2 diabetes related complications, so I don't think natural selection will do it for us here.

Um, there happens to be a fairly large group of people that have large families so that hopeful several of them will live long enough to help support the parents in their old age. There is also the popular "keep popping out kids until we get a male, and possibly a backup male".

There was an interesting TED talk about this recently, the nut was that birth rates aren't correlated to religiosity in a population, they're primarily determined by female literacy, access to birth control, and improvements in infant mortality. (Birth rates often dramatically overstate population, since places with high numbers of births per woman also have high first-year infant mortality.). Even pervasively religious countries like the UAE and Iran are under two births per mother, and poorer countries like Egypt and even India are creeping under 3.

Religion is not a genotype, it's not subject to genetic fitness or natural selection, it cannot be bred in or out. Christians have Christian children for the same reason that Chineses speakers have Chinese-speaking children.

My post was not about restricting research. it was about putting PATENT transgenic species in the wild that can contaminate conventional and organic crops thereby. allowing the massive corporations to come in and sue for patenet infringment when their crop contaminates others. In other words keep the damn think in a sealed building/greenhouse or whatever you want just don't let it contaminate and take over therby yeilding lawsuits on small farmers as from an overly litigious company.

It is worth noting that kiwis are not propagated by seed (like most perennial fruits they are asexually propagated), so even if cross pollination were to occur, it isn't likely to have an effect. Also worth noting that kiwis are generally pollinated by bees (with a minor role played by wind), which dislike kiwi flowers [slashdot.org] and generally pollinate everything else first, so unless they've got bunch of hungry hives on site pollen isn't likely to go far. I don't know what kind of wind drift you see with kiwi pollen or how long it remains viable, but I'd have to assume they have some sort of distance barrier in place too to account for even that, as most trials do take pollination into consideration when selecting a site. I'm not saying there is zero risk, just that it is pretty unlikely to happen, especially if the orchard is managed as it is, and that expecting completely zero risk is not an exceptionally reasonable expectation.

General role of thumb: if though of something about a thing you just heard about something three minuted age, chances are the people who have been working on it for three decades thought of it too. Zero risk

Indeed. It is pretty much a lost battle for us convincing the rest of the world. Primary blame goes to the people who made the marketing decision to rename the "Chinese goosebury" to "kiwifruit". This was entirely predictable, had they thought about it.

I remember when I was in the USA and someone asked me if we ate a lot of kiwis in NZ. I was horrified and explained they were a protected species. It took a while for us to understand each other.

As a kid in Australia, I remember kiwifruit were also synonym'd chinese gooseberry but since the gooseberry wasn't a known fruit in australia, the name never gained popularity. i.e. why is a berry named after a goose and why are we eating 'oriental' fruit cultivated across the ditch?

This is a case of a GMO project that's ignoring regulations. The project had been ordered to follow regulations or shut down back in 2008. They did neither, so now they're being forced to shut down because it's been made clear they can't afford to follow the regulations (ie: putting the trees in a roofed and floored structure, as required by Italian law).

I really want GE/GMO to become universally accepted, but they need to do it properly. These scientists are just giving that much more ammo to the anti-GE lobby.

4000 years ago there was probably some guy that said it was wrong for the people to stop following the great animal herds. He said he was wrong for people to live in the same mud huts year after year and grow wheat/rice/potatoes/maze. He said it was better for people to follow the great herds. Sleep someplace different every night and live on their feet.

And 4000 years ago someone like me said, we're going to build this village. We are going to grow our crops. And we're not going to follow the stupid herds a

If the Chinese engineers and scientists I work with are representative of the Chinese public (and they do seem to echo what I read in the papers), they are less informed and more suspicious of GMO than Europeans. The hot rumor last year was how a village had giant rats because of GM soybeans. They were adamant that the genes had jumped species by rats eating the soybeans.

Yeah, I forgot all the big companies just doing research for the hell of it not to improve crop yields or get a sustainable advantage or anything like that. About the only thing I'm opposed to is that its publicly funded by theft.

But seriously, "greed research"? What kind of company is spending billions on stuff simply for "greed" that isn't going to be used to help feed someone? A corporation's goal is to make money. If I'm producing GM plants, there's a pretty huge marketplace for things that will gro

Italians have voted to not do this. They're tired of US corporations like Monsanto pushing them around. Actually, the US with the push of its power elite was heavily involved in fixing elections and installing a puppet government [wikipedia.org] in Italy, and then making sure [wikipedia.org] that government couldn't be tossed out once it was in [wikipedia.org]. Now Italian workers are told they have to suffer under "austerity" (for them) and be ruled by foreign banks and foreign corporations.

Good for Mario Capanna and company. The Italians democratically voted this in, I have no desire for the Monsantos of the world to find some way to weasel around this. What does Monsanto do anyhow? Create plants with sterile seeds [wikipedia.org], so Monsanto can then grab all of the farmer's money? Sue farmer's whose fields are next to [percyschmeiser.com] Monsanto seed fields, alongside the blowing winds, and get the courts and government's to side with them against small farmers?

The antiquated, anti-enlightenment ideas are not the working people and small farmers trying to protect themselves against a small handful of parasites trying to take ownership of everything. The backwards, antiquated ideas are the corporate newspapers and websites who attack anyone against against handing the whole world on a plate to the parasite heir Monsanto majority shareholders. In Italy, in Greece, in Spain, at Occupy Wall Street and Occupy everywhere, people are fed up with the high unemployment, and the expropriation of surplus value from the majority of working people to a handful of parasitic 1% heirs. This Monsanto GM IP deal is no different than the big companies in IT who own all the patents and are parasitically suing everyone around, and harming economic growth.

Create plants with sterile seeds, so Monsanto can then grab all of the farmer's money? Sue farmer's whose fields are next to Monsanto seed fields, alongside the blowing winds, and get the courts and government's to side with them against small farmers?

So which is it, are they sterile or spreading everywhere? Second, this is publicly funded research. As in, not Monsanto. The only antiquated ideas I see here are placing superstition & conspiracies over science in the name of politics & anti-corporatism.

I am not sure this has much to do with democracy. Mario Capanna is a great guy, but he has no significant power in the current technocrat government, and much less in the current kleptocrat parliament.

Italy is not interested in GMO because their export focuses on quality rather than quantity. Most people I know (yes I am Italian) are likely to be more passionate about using olive oil instead of sunflower oil rather that having e.g. an honest mayor. Using industrial product such as GMO or anything too far fr

A major problem that isn't generally discussed is the pests and diseases don't just cry uncle and move on to non commercial food sources. The problem is evolution kicks in and they get resistant. They are already finding it in some GMO crops. Ultimately the pest and diseases get tougher so they potentially are even more damaging to traditional crops while GMO crops go back to the drawing board. It's very similar to what is happening with antibiotic resistant diseases. It's very much like the old cold war where each side builds bigger weapons. Eventually one side looses and I doubt it'll be nature. The problem is if we loose this war billions potentially starve. Basically all staple crops are being genetically modified so the entire food supply is at risk. I know the belief is science always solves every problem but the antibiotic analogy proves that isn't the case. There are now many incurable strains of diseases with no solution on the horizon. Do we really want to go through the same nightmare with food? It'll take 20 pr 30 years for us to be in the same position with food production but by then it will be far too late. If you don't believe it's happening in GMO crops do some web searches.

The problems with your point is that it is also applicable to conventionally bred resistances. Resistance breakdown is not a new phenomenon. Pathogens and bugs adapt to resistances, and evolution does not care if that resistance came about as a result of selective breeding, wide crossing, mutagenesis, or genetic engineering. Anything that works and is widely used is susceptible to genetic breakdown. People make a big stink about Bt genes losing effectiveness against European corn borer (as they should;

Would it be possible maybe to "save" some of the research by de-planting the tree and replanting them in a more friendly country ? Maybe crowd source it ? I would not mind to pass a few day in italy doing hard work for science, with a shovel.

So, you think an entire field of research shouldn't exist, and you don't care about any arguments? That's pretty much the epitome of anti-intellectualism.
Also, there are hungry people in places other than Africa.

"GMO just does what human controlled breeding would take longer to accomplish."Not really, the change is approached from a very different angle and creates a inherently different result.You might get a similar effect if you used both approaches to get a specific desired effect but it would be a very different plant internally and the side effects of the change would be very different.

Also there are inherent problems with it being so fast. When you can create a new different plant and then have it on consumers plates in a handful of years their is far more risk than a crop strain which was developed over decades/centuries.

"GMO just does what human controlled breeding would take longer to accomplish."

I love how this argument is always wheeled out.I've never seen or heard of human controlled breeding successfully crossing a plant with a fish, yet monsanto have genetically modified some plants with fish genes.

We rigorously test new medicines to make sure there are no side effects, but a new species of plant ?, the test is to put it out into the market and hide its origins so that people dont have a choice.I'm not saying all GM

You obviously cannot cross a plant with a fish through selective breeding. But you're arguing the method not the result. (CS analogy, "I've never heard of a merge sort successfully sorting an array by repeatedly swapping adjacent items like bubble sort"). Just because you can't breed a fish and a plant doesn't mean you cannot get the same resultant organism through breeding. You can, but it takes a whole lot longer.

I'm sorry, but do you have any hard data whatsoever? Everything you've said is at best somewhat believable conjecture otherwise. I can do the same thing and reach the opposite conclusion:

"There are inherent problems with traditional selective breeding. Compared to genetic modification, it creates a very different plant internally and has many side effects, not all of them good. To take just one example, over time plants adapt to insects in their environment and create specific natural pesticides for themsel

Most times with GMO, a single nuclitide base pair is altered, exactly what you would expect with evolution.

I don't think you know what you're talking about. Can you give me even one example where this is so? All the genetic engineering I'm aware of involves inserting one or more entire genes from another (usually very distantly related) organism. (And they do stuff with the promoter regions for the genes, but I'm not so certain about what the story is there.)

No, that is not how GMOs are produced. Genetic engineers insert whole genes from completely different organisms. The inserted gene doesn't even have to come from the same phylum as the original organism. Heck, maybe not even the same kingdom.

HMM?You are comparing what some crazy, negligent to the apocalyptic consequences, farmers have done to GMOs.And how exactly does one of a multitude of genetically identically plants be different? If they use this method are they not cut evolution out of the equation?An actual reasonable non-GMO based agriculture business would mitigate the risks of evolution created dangerous foods to an extreme minimum.

But I cannot comment on the likelihood of evolution randomly generating a poisonous/otherwise dangerous p

The frustrating thing about this controversy is that the reason there's such a strong backlash against GMO plants is the widespread use of a *particular sort* of GMO plant: roundup-ready plants. Here, genetic manipulation has been used to make the plant resistant to Roundup, which is a fairly scary pesticide. And then there are the plants that have had insect toxins engineered into them. These toxins have in some cases been found to be toxic to humans as well.

the reason there's such a strong backlash against GMO plants is the widespread use of a *particular sort* of GMO plant.

While there is some truth to that, I really can't say I agree with that for a couple of reasons. A few considerations in no particular order of importance: glyphosate is actually one of the better herbicides out there in terms of both human and environmental safety, and while no agrochemical input is desirable input, it is one of the least damaging ones (also, not many in the opposition to herbicide tolerant crops will mention the environmental benefits they have provided by facilitating the conversion to

I think you're vastly overestimating people. I think the controversy controversy comes primarily from the fact that most people don't understand genetics at all; it sounds scary to them, so they fear anything that deals with it. Natural is good, and unnatural is bad. It's a similar deal with nuclear power, really, where the thing I can't see and don't understand is inherently too scary to permit.

You should read the rest of the wikipedia article, not just the first paragraph of the toxicity section. Also, it turns out that the excessive use of roundup-ready GMO crops has, shockingly, caused evolution to occur in the midwest, where it was thought to be impossible. Consequently, the next generation of pesticide-ready GMO crops will be much more exciting. Another point I neglected to mention earlier is that if you are a farmer who does not use roundup-ready seeds, but does save seeds for planting

the 'green revolution' of pesticides and fertilizer did not end hunger. hunger is not caused by a lack of supply , but by the distribution methods. many countries that experience starvation are also experiencing brutal wars, dictatorships, lack of civil society, property rights, etc etc etc. afghanistan, for example, from 1979 to the present. they had to set aside things like crops and farming so that they could grow opium and fight a proxy war on behalf of the two the superpowers.

then there is the fact that most costs of food nowdays in places like the US go to marketing, and 'value added' stuff like freezing, dehydrating, processing, and otherwise repackaging basic wheat, corn, soy, etc, into pizza rolls, snack chips, etc etc.

That is, of course, true. The only thing that will end hunger is if everyone lives in a free open democratic country with a decent market economy and a government that actually cares about its people, with decent education, healthcare, infrastructure, ect. Obviously, hunger is a complex social issue and a scientific solution isn't going to change the root cause of the problem. However, it is not a binary choice between GMOs will save the world vs GMOs are no help. Improved genotypes, be they transgenic

"fighting hunger" -> The world produces far more food then it could even eat let alone what is necessary right now. Also GMOs, since they are patented and that is how you get terminator genes, are one of the biggest issues causing/potentially causing in the future hunger and food shortages."better nutrition" -> We already have tons of super nutritious foods. unfortunately modern agriculture has been breeding nutrition out of their crops for decades, pretty much every food processor removes everything

That info is really outdated. Recent studies over larger scale and more produce show that on the average conventional produce around 34% more, the best it from organic is strawberries with organic being under conventional by 3%.

Yeah, but that really doesn't look at long term sustainability, if the field you got 34% more off is good to go next season, or it's bee sucked dry and needs massive doses of chemical fertilizers to produce properly.